The stunning disclosure of a secret recording between Donald Trump and his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen took Trumpworld and legal veterans by surprise on Tuesday night, landing right in the middle of the cable-news prime-time schedule. During the 9 P.M. hour on CNN, Chris Cuomo debuted a tape of Cohen and Trump discussing the latter’s preferred method for killing former Playmate Karen McDougal’s story of their alleged affair. Soon afterward, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox News to declare that the tape was suspiciously clipped; that Cohen was a dirtbag for taping Trump during a privileged conversation; and that his client, the president of the United States, wanted the hush payment made via check, ensuring a responsible paper trail. Meanwhile, on MSNBC, greenroom denizen Michael Avenatti acknowledged what most sentient people heard on the tape: that Trump wanted to pay cash while Cohen insisted on a check.

Nobody looked good in this situation. “I am mystified,” William Jeffress, who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me, referring to the decision by Trump’s legal team to waive privilege on the tape, allowing it to be released, and, presumably facilitating its leakage. Cohen, too, seemed somewhat thirsty. “If he wants to cooperate with prosecutors, he should go ahead and do that in private,” Renato Mariotti, a former Illinois prosecutor, told me in reference to Cohen, who is under investigation in the Southern District of New York. “There is really nothing for him to be gained from having these public conversations.”

But in a conversation early Wednesday morning, Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis, who oversaw the release of the tape, characterized the move as the first shot fired in the P.R. war against Trump and Giuliani, who he accused of launching a smear campaign against his client. “Yesterday, we made a decision—a pretty important, legal decision that we will not discuss any legal issues that might be a part of the investigation process . . . However, because President Trump and Rudy Giuliani chose to lie and attack,” Davis told me, “I am laying down a marker.”

After The New York Timesreported Friday that Cohen taped his conversation with Trump about payments made to McDougal—one of a dozen conversations New York prosecutors collected during an April F.B.I. search of Cohen’s properties—Giuliani declared that it would serve as “powerful exculpatory evidence” on the president’s behalf, and asserted that Trump had no knowledge of the McDougal arrangement beforehand. But Davis clearly believes otherwise. After dismissing Giuliani’s characterizations over the weekend, Davis laid out his motivation behind releasing the audio recording. “We are not going to allow [Giuliani] to smear and distort. Once in a while, we get lucky and I have a tape,” he said, defiantly. “Don’t believe me—I am a Democrat. Believe everything is ‘fake news,’ if you wish—the way Mr. Trump says it is. But believe your own ears. That tape is symbolic . . . Listen to the tape. They are lying. Don’t believe me. Listen to the tape.”

The audio recording, though scratchy, provides context surrounding the $150,000 payment from the American Media company, which owns The National Enquirer, to McDougal, shortly before the 2016 presidential election for the exclusive rights to her story about her affair with Trump, which allegedly took place roughly a decade ago. (Trump has denied the affair.) On the tape, Cohen can be heard discussing setting up a company to purchase the rights to McDougal’s story from American Media. “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David,” Cohen can be heard saying in the recording, a likely reference to David Pecker, the head of American Amedia and a longtime ally of Trump. Later, after Cohen references “financing,” Trump asks, “What financing?” To which, Cohen responds, “We’ll have to pay.” Trump then appears to say, “Pay with cash,” which is met by a series of “Nos” from Cohen. The word “check” is then said, though it is unclear by whom before the recording cuts off.

After the tape’s release, Giuliani insisted that the recording provides no evidence that his client did anything illegal, and disputed that Trump can be heard encouraging Cohen to make a six-figure cash payment to buy the rights to McDougal’s story. “There’s no way the president is going to be talking about setting up a corporation and then using cash, unless you’re a complete idiot,” Giuliani asserted during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday night. Instead, the former New York City mayor said it was Trump who suggested that they pay by check. A transcript of the recording released by the president’s lawyers documents Trump as saying, “Don’t pay with cash . . . check.”

But Davis is adamant in his stance. “Every single time that Rudy Giuliani lies or makes things up—like he invented a transcript putting words that literally cannot be heard on the tape—you have people still believing him and not listening to the tape, because they are in Trump country and they don’t want to actually confront a tape that contradicts a president who is lying,” Davis said. “This is the beginning of my ability to rebut lies that are smearing my client. That’s it.” When I asked whether we can expect Cohen and Co. to drop more tapes, should similar situations arise, he responded, “Maybe.”

At the center of the escalating Trump-Cohen saga is the question of whether Cohen ever engaged in, or was privy to, illegal activity on behalf of his client. On its own, the tape that Davis released to CNN falls short of answering these questions. When news broke of the payments to McDougal and Stormy Daniels, an adult-film star to whom Cohen disbursed a $130,000 hush-money payment shortly before the election, legal experts wondered whether the outlays may have violated campaign-finance laws. And while the recording certainly provides details surrounding American Media’s payment to McDougal, Rick Hasen, a law professor at U.C. Irvine, and an expert on campaign-finance law, suggested it didn’t provide any conclusions. “If you are looking for a smoking gun, this isn’t it.” Hasen continued that while the tape “certainly provides enough of a reason to engage in further investigation,” it doesn’t establish that the payments were campaign-related or illuminate Trump’s state of mind at the time. Sol Wisenberg, who served as deputy prosecutor in the Starr investigation, agreed. “Based on what has been released so far, I don’t see evidence of a crime by President Trump,” he told me.

But as Jeffress noted in our conversation, the ease with which Cohen and Trump discuss the payment to McDougal suggests that this is not the first time they have broached the topic. “Obviously, they have had prior conversations about it,” he told me, matter-of-factly. If that is the case, “it forecloses certain arguments that the president’s team could have,” Mariotti told me. “It means that they can’t argue that he had no knowledge, or that he wasn’t familiar with the transaction.” He continued: “From a legal perspective, that is probably the most important thing. And, really, the question then is just: what other evidence do prosecutors have that is legally significant?”

This context suggests that other tapes or further evidence in the prosecution’s possession could more fully answer these questions. “The tape suggests a concerted effort by Trump personally to silence a story, and possibly even to conspire to commit campaign-finance violations. But the tape is hard for us to assess without more information,” said Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under Barack Obama. “It is one piece of a larger story that Mueller is looking into.” Indeed, it is a story that people close to Cohen tell my colleague Emily Jane Fox could involve “core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe.” However Cohen chooses to proceed now, the message has been sent. “The release of the tape by Michael Cohen to CNN signals danger for the president—it shows Cohen has started to make the choice to break from Trump,” Katyal continued. “Given Trump’s congenital inability to tell the truth or obey the law, this is very bad news indeed for Trump, as Cohen was undoubtedly witness to many sordid events.”